a blog about the passion for research, the research on passion, motivation and emotion, experience sampling, and occasionally also about open science

Passion Research LINKS

This is a short collection of different lines of research on passion. This link list is far from complete. Passion is a buzzword in many research disciplines, and passion-related publications keep popping up. If you wish to add examples, feel invited to mail me!

Psychological Research on Passion

The Dual Model of Passion:
Since 2003, the research group around Robert Vallerand studies the psychological aspects of passion. The dual model of passion describes beneficial aspects of “harmonious passion”, and risky, potentially harmful aspects of “obsessive passion”. Kindly, the researchers provide most of their articles as well as the measurement instrument (“Passion Scale”) online. see here a LINK to the homepage of Robert Vallerand.

Entrepreneurial Passion:
Melissa Cardon and colleagues have studied the conceptualization, measurement, and relevance of passion in entrepreneurial processes (inventing, funding, developing). Their studies extend and go beyond the research on the Dual Model of Passion. See here a LINK to a talk of Melissa Cardon about Entrepreneurial Passion.

The Commitment and Passion Model:
Recently, Julia Moeller (author of this blog) and her colleagues have pointed out the large overlaps between the constructs of passion and commitment. After a thorough review of constructs related to passion, they suggested a scale for the assessment of both passion and commitment, and studied the situational variability and long-term stability of passion, as well as the relation of passion to facets of personality. See here a LINK to the dissertation of Julia Moeller about passion.

Passion in the Triangular Theory of Love:In his Triangular Theory of Love, Robert Sternberg specified three important components of love: passion, intimacy, and commitment. Passion is here understood as a short term ‘limerence’ and sexual/physical attraction, characterized by high arousal, frequent thoughts about a loved person, and quick fade out. This is a bit in contrast to other psychological definitions of passion, which emphasize more the long-lasting aspects. See here a LINK to the wikipedia page about the Triangular Theory of Love

Historical Research on Passion

Dixon, T. (2003). From passions to emotions. The creation of a secular psychological category. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. LINK to the publisher
This is a great text about the development of the psychological construct of emotions, which emerged out of the -rather theological- concept of passions, when Psychology emancipated as secular science. Which raises the question whether the recent return to the concept of passion is a return to the myths?